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Transit: A Novel
Transit: A Novel
Transit: A Novel
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Transit: A Novel

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National Bestseller A Finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize A Finalist for the Goldsmiths PrizeLonglisted for the International DUBLIN Literary Award One of Time Magazine's Top 10 Fiction Books of the Year

A New York Times Book Review Notable BookNamed a Best Book of the Year by Time, The Guardian, BOMB Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Commonweal, Southern Living, NOW Magazine, The Washington Independent Review of Books, Book Depository, The Globe and Mail, and The National Post (Canada)

The stunning second novel of a trilogy that began with Outline, one of The New York Times Book Review’s ten best books of 2015

In the wake of her family’s collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London. The process of this upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions—personal, moral, artistic, and practical—as she endeavors to construct a new reality for herself and her children. In the city, she is made to confront aspects of living that she has, until now, avoided, and to consider questions of vulnerability and power, death and renewal, in what becomes her struggle to reattach herself to, and believe in, life.

Filtered through the impersonal gaze of its keenly intelligent protagonist, Transit sees Rachel Cusk delve deeper into the themes first raised in her critically acclaimed novel Outline and offers up a penetrating and moving reflection on childhood and fate, the value of suffering, the moral problems of personal responsibility, and the mystery of change.

In this second book of a precise, short, yet epic cycle, Cusk describes the most elemental experiences, the liminal qualities of life. She captures with unsettling restraint and honesty the longing to both inhabit and flee one’s life, and the wrenching ambivalence animating our desire to feel real.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 17, 2017
ISBN9780374714574
Transit: A Novel
Author

Rachel Cusk

RACHEL CUSK is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Second Place and the Outline trilogy. She has written three memoirs—A Life’s Work, The Last Supper and Aftermath—as well as the novels Saving Agnes, winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award; The Country Life, which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Temporary; The Lucky Ones; In the Fold; Arlington Park; and The Bradshaw Variations. Twice a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award, and named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists for 2003, Rachel Cusk is Canadian and lives in Paris.

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Rating: 4.042452840566038 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is a book that I heard about but would not have normally read. On a recent long vacation I found this book in our rental and decided to read it. It is an interesting process that the author uses which is basically having a narrator who is the main character(she is a mildly successful writer) and her interface with people that she knows or meets. The writing is good and the topics are interesting. I enjoyed it but not enough to read the other books in Cusk's trilogy of which this is the 2nd book
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Well, I thought I had posted a review of this wonderful book, but I must not have saved it, so I'll do the best that I can from memory. Transit is the second book in Cusk's Outline trilogy. This book is better than the first, so I can hardly wait to get to the third and final installment, Kudos. The main character is a successful female writer. Outline traced her travels to Greece to teach a creative writing course. Cusk used the novel to demonstrate, in a way, the writer's process of outlining her story. The protagonist's role is primarily to listen to the stories of others--the passenger sitting next to her on an airplane, the students in her class--and record them. In other words, the writer's primary task is listening and observing, gathering potentially usable information, then shuffling all the material into the loosely organized shape of a developing novel. Transit focuses more on the writer herself at a point of transition in her own life. She has returned to England, her marriage has fallen apart, she's getting a bit bored with the book talk circuit, and she's ready to reassess and rebuild--much as an author would do while working on a draft. Her rebuilding takes a literal form as she moves out of the central city and into a seedy fixer-upper in a rather unsavory part of town. There are two problems: the contractors who call to give estimates for the essential repairs are dubious as to whether the house can really be fixed up, and the elderly couple who live downstairs are are every neighbor's worst nightmare. She finally settles on a pair of Polish builders who assure her that they can handle both problems. In the meantime, she deals with her two young sons and their not-all-that-involved father, the writer's conference from hell, and friends who just don't understand why she decided to leave the city. While we still see her sitting back and observing the whirl of events around her. we also see the writer herself as a developing character, one taking on the task of rebuilding her life and revising her approach to it and to others.Cusk seems to be having a lot more fun with Transit than she did with the first novel. There's more humor here (the book festival episode is at times hilarious), and her characters are more defined. The writer herself does a good deal of self-assessment. Terrific writing here as well! I can't wait to read the next installment. I've been stuck in some not-so-great books, so I may just have to spring for the full price rather than waiting for a sale or for a library copy.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I liked Rachel Cusk's novel, Outline, quite a bit, even more once I saw what she was doing with it. So it wasn't a big surprise that I enjoyed every page of its sequel, Transit, although she's not doing quite the same thing here. With Outline, the protagonist was passive, becoming a receptacle for the stories of others. In Transit, she has returned to the UK from Greece and purchased a flat in London that came with terrible neighbors and a desperate need of renovation.For a long time, I said, I believed that it was only through absolute passivity that you could learn to see what was really there. But my decision to create a disturbance by renovating my house had awoken a different reality, as though I had disturbed a beast, sleeping in its lair. I had started to become, in effect, angry.The protagonist is still listening to people as they bare parts of themselves to her, but she's also present in her life in a way she wasn't in Outline. That said, this is still not a plot-driven novel. She attends a literary festival, gets work done on her house and has coffee or dinner with people. Yet, the glimpses into the minds of others is fascinating, as well as her own reactions to what they tell her. And Cusk's writing is very fine; it's as clear and unobtrusive as water.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Probably admired rather than enjoyed this book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    When I first started reading this book I didn't think I would like it. There was some extremely flowery prose and I couldn't even understand what it meant. This book was not plot driven and I would like to have known how certain things turned out--eg. her flat renovation. I felt like there was some negative undercurrent with her children that I would liked to have known more about. I'm not even sure this book was character driven. Slightly but all these ancillary characters were the ones that revealed more about Faye (if that's even her name--it's so seldom used). But the book was different and I could see myself reading it again to see what I missed.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Read this book because it is on the Giller short list. Why I am not sure. The Giller is a Canadian Award and this author is living in England and the story takes place in London. I also did not realize that this is book 2, the first was Outline. It is a story of a woman, divorced, mother of two who is in transition. There are some beautiful quote worthy lines in this book. The title of the book pretty much sums up the themes found in the book. Rating: 3.62
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Continuing the narrative of the writer first met in Outline, here Faye returns to London after a divorce. Again, the encounters with other characters shape the narrative, from the chair at a book festival to the builders trying to make her flat liveable. There's not really a plot as such, more pictures from a life.I liked it a lot.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The blurb for this book makes it sound like a far more linear and coherent narrative than it really is. It reads mostly like a series of conversations between Faye, the narrator, and various friends, her hairdresser, her builder, fellow authors at a literary festival etc. Faye contributes little to these conversations; the other party to them unburdens him or her self to an extraordinary degree and in a very philosophical fashion. Many of the conversations centre on the nature of reality or freedom or honesty and are hard to follow. On the other hand there is a lot of humour here and the story is strangely compelling.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    So difficult to review or even tag this magnificent beautiful book. I compared Outline to Olive Kitteridge, mostly for the literary device of revealing the protagonist by portraits of those she encounters. But that doesn't even due justice to the brilliance of this book. Calming, evocative, thoughtful writing. I am going to re-read Aftermath now just because I love her writing so much.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In Transit, Rachel Cusk continues the adventures of Faye, the unflappable and preternaturally observant narrator of her previous novel, Outline. Faye is a fiction writer with a significant professional profile: she is invited to literary festivals, asked to run workshops and participate in panel discussions. The tone and structure of Transit is identical to Outline. In a series of loosely connected vignettes, Faye finds herself in the company of various individuals in ever varying circumstances, and in each case assumes the role of audience as they narrate the story of some highly personal, unforgettable or otherwise noteworthy life event. Faye’s circumstances have changed. In Transit, she is newly separated from her husband and living in London, having purchased a run-down council flat for herself and her two sons. The disruption to Faye’s own life caused by the move into and subsequent renovation of the flat is the novel’s chief framing element. One could make a case that Transit is not a novel but in fact a collection of linked stories. Indeed, it often seems to the reader that, despite the commonalities that many of the episodes share, each exists in its own isolated sphere of time and space. In one Faye meets an old boyfriend and learns that he is in a new relationship that, paradoxically, was affirmed and strengthened by an atrocious act of neglect on his part. In another she meets a writer at a literary festival who gleefully tells stories of his stepfather’s cruelty to anyone willing to listen. And in another she drives out of the city to have dinner with her cousin and his wife, some friends of theirs, and their children, and the evening deteriorates into tantrums and squabbling. In each of these chapters, as in others in the book, we witness people at pains to explain or justify themselves, to tell an intimate tale of how events they have gone through have shaped the person they have become. Where Outline seemed to imply that the “self” we construct for public consumption is completed in our transactions with other people, Transit focuses instead on the notion that life is an ongoing process of adjusting, altering and tailoring ourselves to suit changing needs and circumstances, suggesting that we are constantly in transit: from one place to another, or in transition from one state of being to another. Both novels share the cool tone and visual precision of Cusk’s razor-sharp, deliciously readable prose. Transit, a triumph of form blended with content, additionally showcases the author’s remarkable ability to duplicate a narrative strategy from a previous novel and create yet another fresh and compelling work of fiction, one that not only stands on its own but equals and perhaps even surpasses the success of its predecessor.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    From the opening unsolicited promise of cosmic, or at least astrological, significance, the central character of Rachel Cusk’s novel observes life in transit. Whether it be a case of changing homes, or substantially renovating a dwelling, or the transition of state from single to married to single to married, or just the acquisition of a beautiful dog — almost everything, it seems, proffers opportunities for meaningfulness. In the face of so much meaning, how indeed could one fail “to regain faith in the grandeur of the human”? Yet the grandeur of the human comes in such banal, mundane, clothing, it might easily pass unnoticed. As in her previous novel, Outline, Cusk’s narrator, Faye, notices.The writing here is measured and calm. Even a melodramatic scene toward the end is observed as one might treat a Greek chorus, its significance no greater or less than any other event on offer. But does this speak to some ultimate purpose, a fate to which we must reconcile ourselves? Or does the equivocation put the lie to the presumption of meaningfulness? Faye doesn’t take sides, slipping away at the end like a house guest after a trying party. And so we are left with what? A passing storm? The transit of a planet across a constellation? A novel? In each case we are left to make of them what we will.These are heady metaphysical waters. But Cusk handles such matters gently. You might easily go along on the current and only realize your transposition of locale after the fact. Just what reading a novel ought to enable. Nicely done!Definitely recommended.

Book preview

Transit - Rachel Cusk

An astrologer emailed me to say she had important news for me concerning events in my immediate future. She could see things that I could not: my personal details had come into her possession and had allowed her to study the planets for their information. She wished me to know that a major transit was due to occur shortly in my sky. This information was causing her great excitement when she considered the changes it might represent. For a small fee she would share it with me and enable me to turn it to my advantage.

She could sense – the email continued – that I had lost my way in life, that I sometimes struggled to find meaning in my present circumstances and to feel hope for what was to come; she felt a strong personal connection between us, and while she couldn’t explain the feeling, she knew too that some things ought to defy explanation. She understood that many people closed their minds to the meaning of the sky above their heads, but she firmly believed I was not one of those people. I did not have the blind belief in reality that made others ask for concrete explanations. She knew that I had suffered sufficiently to begin asking certain questions, to which as yet I had received no reply. But the movements of the planets represented a zone of infinite reverberation to human destiny: perhaps it was simply that some people could not believe they were important enough to figure there. The sad fact, she said, is that in this era of science and unbelief we have lost the sense of our own significance. We have become cruel, to ourselves and others, because we believe that ultimately we have no value. What the planets offer, she said, is nothing less than the chance to regain faith in the grandeur of the human: how much more dignity and honour, how much kindness and responsibility and respect, would we bring to our dealings with one another if we believed that each and every one of us had a cosmic importance? She felt that I of all people could see the implications here for improvements in world peace and prosperity, not to mention the revolution an enhanced concept of fate could bring about in the personal side of things. She hoped I would forgive her for contacting me in this way and for speaking so openly. As she had already said, she felt a strong personal connection between us that had encouraged her to say what was in her heart.

It seemed possible that the same computer algorithms that had generated this email had also generated the astrologer herself: her phrases were too characterful, and the note of character was repeated too often; she was too obviously based on a human type to be, herself, human. As a result her sympathy and concern were slightly sinister; yet for those same reasons they also seemed impartial. A friend of mine, depressed in the wake of his divorce, had recently admitted that he often felt moved to tears by the concern for his health and well-being expressed in the phraseology of adverts and food packaging, and by the automated voices on trains and buses, apparently anxious that he might miss his stop; he actually felt something akin to love, he said, for the female voice that guided him while he was driving his car, so much more devotedly than his wife ever had. There has been a great harvest, he said, of language and information from life, and it may have become the case that the faux-human was growing more substantial and more relational than the original, that there was more tenderness to be had from a machine than from one’s fellow man. After all, the mechanised interface was the distillation not of one human but of many. Many astrologers had had to live, in other words, for this one example to have been created. What was soothing, he believed, was the very fact that this oceanic chorus was affixed in no one person, that it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere: he recognised that a lot of people found this idea maddening, but for him the erosion of individuality was also the erosion of the power to hurt.

It was this same friend – a writer – who had advised me, back in the spring, that if I was moving to London with limited funds, it was better to buy a bad house in a good street than a good house somewhere bad. Only the very lucky and the very unlucky, he said, get an unmixed fate: the rest of us have to choose. The estate agent had been surprised that I adhered to this piece of wisdom, if wisdom it was. In his experience, he said, creative people valued the advantages of light and space over those of location. They tended to look for the potential in things, where most people sought the safety of conformity, of what had already been realised to the maximum, properties whose allure was merely the sum of exhausted possibilities, to which nothing further could be added. The irony, he said, was that such people, while afraid of being original, were also obsessed with originality. His clients went into ecstasies over the merest hint of a period feature: well, move out of the centre a little and you could have those in abundance for a fraction of the cost. It was a mystery to him, he said, why people continued to buy in over-inflated parts of the city when there were bargains to be had in up-and-coming areas. He supposed at the heart of it was their lack of imagination. Currently we were at the top of the market, he said: this situation, far from discouraging buyers, seemed actually to inflame them. He was witnessing scenes of outright pandemonium on a daily basis, his office stampeded with people elbowing one another aside to pay too much for too little as though their lives depended on it. He had conducted viewings where fights had broken out, presided over bidding wars of unprecedented aggression, had even been offered bribes for preferential treatment; all, he said, for properties that, looked at in the cold light of day, were unexceptional. What was striking was the genuine desperation of these people, once they were in the throes of desire: they would phone him hourly for updates, or call in at the office for no reason; they begged, and sometimes even wept; they were angry one minute and penitent the next, often regaling him with long confessions concerning their personal circumstances. He would have pitied them, were it not for the fact that they invariably erased the drama from their minds the instant it was over and the purchase completed, shedding not only the memory of their own conduct but also of the people who had had to put up with it. He had had clients who had shared the most gruesome intimacies with him one week and then walked past him in the street the next without the slightest sign of recognition; he had seen couples who had sunk to the depths before his eyes, now going obliviously about their business in the neighbourhood. Only in the very completeness of their oblivion did he sometimes detect a hint of shame. In the early days of his career he had found such incidents upsetting, but luckily experience had taught him not to take it to heart. He understood that for them he was a figure conjured out of the red mist of their desire, an object, so to speak, of transference. Yet the desire itself continued to bewilder him. Sometimes he concluded that people only want what it is not certain they can have; at other times it seemed to him more complex. Frequently, his clients would admit to feeling relief that their desire had been thwarted: the same people who had stormed and wept like frustrated children because a property was being denied them, would be found days later sitting calmly in his office, expressing gratitude for the fact that they hadn’t got it. They could see now that it would have been completely wrong for them; they wanted to know what else he had on his books. For most people, he said, finding and procuring a home was an intensely active state; and activity entails a certain blindness, the blindness of fixation. Only when their will has been exhausted do the majority of people recognise the decree of fate.

We were sitting in his office while this conversation occurred. Outside, the traffic moved sluggishly along the grey, dirty London street. I said that the frenzy he had described, rather than arousing me to compete, extinguished any enthusiasm I might have had for house-hunting and made me want to walk immediately away. Besides, I didn’t have the money to engage in bidding wars. I understood that in the market conditions he had described, I was therefore unlikely to find anywhere to live. But at the same time, I rebelled against the idea that creative people, as he had called them, should allow themselves to be marginalised by what he had politely described as their superior values. He had used, I believed, the word ‘imagination’: the worst possible thing for such a person was to quit the centre as an act of self-protection and take shelter in an aesthetic reality by which the outside world remained untransfigured. If I didn’t want to compete, I wanted even less to make new rules about what constituted victory. I would want what everyone else wanted, even if I couldn’t attain it.

The estate agent seemed somewhat taken aback by these remarks. He had not meant to imply, he said, that I ought to be marginalised. He simply thought I would get more for my money, and get it more easily, in a less overheated neighbourhood. He could see I was in a vulnerable position. And such fatalism as mine was rare in the world he worked in. But if I was determined to run with the pack, well, he did have something he could show me. He had the details right in front of him: it had just come back on the market that morning, the previous sale having fallen through. It was a council-owned property: they were keen to find another buyer straight away, and the price reflected that fact. As I could see, he said, it was in pretty poor condition – in fact, it was virtually uninhabitable. Most of his clients, hungry as they were, wouldn’t have touched it in a million years. If I would permit him to use the word ‘imagination’, it was beyond the scope of most people’s; though admittedly it was in a very desirable location. But given my situation, he couldn’t in all conscience offer me encouragement. It was a job for a developer or a builder, someone who could look at it impersonally; the problem was the margins were too small for that kind of person to be interested. He looked me in the eye for the first time. Obviously it’s not a place, he said, where you could expect children to live.

Several weeks later, when the transaction was concluded, I happened to pass the estate agent in the street. He was walking along on his own, a sheaf of papers clutched to his chest and a set of keys jingling in his fingers. I was careful to acknowledge him, remembering what he had said, but he merely glanced at me blankly and looked away again. That was in early summer; it was now the beginning of autumn. It was the astrologer’s remarks about cruelty that had reminded me of that incident, which at the time had seemed to prove that whatever we might wish to believe about ourselves, we are only the result of how others have treated us. There was a link in the astrologer’s email to the planetary reading she had made for me. I paid the money and read what it said.

Gerard was instantly recognisable: he was riding through the traffic on his bicycle in the sun and passed by without seeing me, his face lifted. He wore an exalted expression which reminded me of the element of drama in his persona and of the evening fifteen years earlier when he had sat naked on the windowsill of our top-floor flat with his legs dangling down into the darkness saying that he didn’t believe I loved him. The only noticeable difference was his hair, which he’d allowed to grow into an arresting mane of wild black curls.

I saw him again a few days later: it was early in the morning and this time he was standing beside his bicycle in the street, holding the hand of a small girl in school uniform. I had once lived with Gerard for several months in the flat he had owned where, as far as I knew, he still remained. At the end of that period I had left him, without much ceremony or explanation, for someone else and had moved away from London. For a few years afterwards, he would sometimes call our house in the countryside, his voice sounding so faint and far away that it was as if he was calling from some place of actual exile. Then one day he sent me a long handwritten letter covering several pages, in which he appeared to be explaining to me why he had found my behaviour both incomprehensible and morally incorrect. It had arrived in the exhausting time just after my older son was born; I was unable to read it to the end, and had added to the list of my sins by not answering it.

After we had greeted one another, and expressed an astonishment that on my side was feigned since I had already seen him once without him seeing me, Gerard introduced the small girl as his daughter.

‘Clara,’ she said in a firm, high, quavering voice, when I asked her name.

Gerard asked how old mine were now, as though the bald fact of parenthood might be softened if I were implicated in it too. He said he had seen me interviewed somewhere – it was probably years ago now, to be honest – and the description of my house on the Sussex coast had made him quite envious. The South Downs were one of his favourite parts of the country. He was surprised, he said, to find me back here in the city.

‘Clara and I walked the South Downs Way once,’ he said. ‘Didn’t we, Clara?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘I’ve often thought that’s where we’d go if we ever left London,’ Gerard said. ‘Diane lets me read the estate-agent porn, so long as it stops there.’

‘Diane’s my mum,’ Clara explained, with dignity.

The street where we were standing was one of the broad tree-lined avenues of handsome Victorian houses that seemed to act as the guarantors of the neighbourhood’s respectability. Their well-pruned hedges and large, polished front windows, when I passed them, had always caused me groundless feelings of both security and absolute exclusion. The flat I had shared with Gerard had been nearby, on a street where the first faint downward cadences of tone could be heard as the neighbourhood began its transition towards the run-down, traffic-choked boroughs further east: the houses, though still handsome, bore the occasional imperfection; the hedges were a little more unruly. The flat had been a big, rambling network of rooms on the upper storeys of an Edwardian villa, whose striking views were expressive of the descent from the salubrious to the squalid, a dichotomy Gerard had seemed at the time either to be presiding over or imprisoned in. From the back was the Palladian vista westward, of well-kept lawns and lofty trees and discreet half-glimpses of other handsome houses. From the front was a bleak panorama of urban desolation of which, since the building stood on a rise, the flat had had a particularly unshielded view. Gerard had once pointed out a long, low structure in the distance and told me it was a women’s prison: our view of it was so clear that at night the tiny orange dots that were the tips of the prisoners’ cigarettes could be seen as they smoked on the walkway along their cells.

The playground noises coming from behind the high wall beside us were getting louder. Gerard put his hand on Clara’s shoulder, and bent down to speak in a low voice into her ear. He was evidently delivering some kind of reprimand, and I found myself remembering his letter again and its cataloguing of my shortcomings. She was a tiny, fragile, pretty creature but her elfin face assumed an expression of superb martyrdom while he spoke that suggested she had inherited some of her father’s melodramatic demeanour. She listened interestedly while he corrected her, her sagacious brown eyes staring unblinking into the distances of the road. Nodding very slightly in response to his final question, she turned and walked aloofly among the other children through the gates.

I asked Gerard how old she was.

‘Eight,’ he said. ‘Going on eighteen.’

I was surprised by the discovery that Gerard had a child. In the time when I knew him he had been so far from resolving the difficulties of his own childhood that it was hard to believe he was now a father. The strangeness was accentuated by the fact that in every other respect he seemed unchanged: his sallow-skinned face with its soft, long-lashed, slightly childlike eyes was unaged; his left-hand trouser leg was still held back by a bicycle clip, as it always had been; the violin case strapped across his back had always been such a permanent feature of his appearance that I didn’t think to ask what it was still doing there. When Clara had disappeared from view Gerard

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